


Negative Coping

by emmaliza



Category: Take That (Band)
Genre: Angst, Education, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Psychological Trauma, The Wilderness Years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 13:33:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16682551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emmaliza/pseuds/emmaliza
Summary: Jason Orange, and the things that education cannot fix.





	Negative Coping

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by an old prompt asking for Wilderness Years fic with Jason.
> 
> Disclaimer: the British education system utterly baffles me; I _hope_ I got the whole secondary school/college/university differences down, but like, I'm sure I have in fact screwed it up.

Jason is always first to class.

Pencils, pens, books all spread out in front of him, he turns up a good fifteen minutes ahead of everyone else, just in case. If this were secondary school again, the room wouldn't be open for him to get in, but it's college and they trust them to look after themselves. It's not as awkward as it could have been, since at he's at a separate college, not one attached to a proper school, and they seem to have shepharded them folks who are really too old for this into their own special class; Jason's not even the oldest one there. So he can convince himself it's normal, that he's thirty one years old and just now doing his A-levels in History, Literature, and Psychology – he didn't fall behind long ago, and is now desperately trying to catch up.

History, Literature, and Psychology, those are his subjects. His – teachers? professors? – tell him he's a natural scholar, and he's not going to argue. From _Jane Eyre_ to Napoleon's conquest of Europe, he drinks in as much of it as he possibly can, wanting to understand it all. He wants to understand the world. Logically, he knows no-one understands the whole world – that's what academia is for, so people who understand one bit of the world can interact with people who understand a different bit – but he tries.

The psychology, though, that's always the tricky one. Perhaps that's because it's more science-based, or perhaps he's just trying harder. He's got pages and pages of notes, handwriting as messy as an autograph, and he pours over them late at night, trying to understand. From Piaget's stages to the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, Jason does try to learn it all.

One day, the teacher is writing out a long list of coping mechanisms on the blackboard. Jason copies them all down – denial to displacement, projection to passive-aggression, repression and supression, it's all more to learn, all more insight into the whole human race.

Jason copies it all down, and does not think about it that much.

* * *

There's a girl in his class who fancies Robbie. Well, statistically speaking there are probably a couple, but there's only one he's overheard talk about it with her friends, excited to go to his concert in a couple of months. Jason doesn't bother keeping track of when and where Robbie is actually performing. He just sort of assumes he always is.

Jason knows that everyone in his class knows who he is, but either they're all too polite to mention it, or, perhaps more likely, they don't really care. The girl who fancies Robbie definitely doesn't. She's twenty one – young by their standards, if old for college in general. She would have been, what, fourteen when they split, so maybe she was a fan of Take That before Robbie – but somehow, Jason doubts it. She's never looked at him with anything but confusion, and possibly slight disdain.

Maybe she knows. Jason's not sure if she should know – if that detail ever made it into the papers; he makes it a point not to read them – but she could do.

They've never talked; Jason's not even overly sure what her name is. That's the way he prefers it.

There are a lot of girls at this school, young, impressionable girls, like the sort who used to turn up backstage after their gigs. Jason does his best to keep away from them. He knows he's still good looking, and he is by nature a bit of a flirt, but that's not what he's here for. He's here to learn.

They're all too old for a uniform, but Jason makes sure he's always modestly dressed, even when it's hot – a button up shirt and trousers down to his ankles; he tries to wear light colours so as not to absorb the sun, but he can't bear to have an inch below the neck and above his foot showing. He has to be careful not to wear too light fabrics either, because he can't let someone see through it. He doesn't want anyone to see through him.

The girl stumbles on her way into class one day, books spilling everywhere, and Jason, ever the gentleman and always sitting in the front row anyway, is already on his feet and helping her gather her things.

She – Rebecca, is that her name? – smiles at him, thanks him politely. But she looks right through him. She doesn't know him. No-one knows him, anymore.

_There's always another pretty dancer, you know,_ whispers a voice at the back of his head.

* * *

One of the blokes in Jason's class has a daughter. Jason knows basically nothing other than that, he doesn't know who this guy is or what the family situation is or how old he is, if the girl was planned or an accident, how old _she_ is, anything like that. All he knows is that he's heard someone mention having to go pick up his little girl from daycare every now and again.

It shouldn't unnerve him as much as it does. After all, plenty of his classmates are just as old as him, in their early thirties, well old enough to have kids. He sits in history class, and he learns that, a few centuries back, if someone – mostly the women, but probably also some fellas – hadn't had at least one baby by his age, people would start wondering if there was something wrong with him.

But Jason doesn't feel like he's ready to have kids. He feels like a glorified teenage boy. He's still at school, for fuck's sake.

He knows that's just his problem though; people younger than him have kids all the time. Gary has kids. Howard does too, but that's less unsettling; Howard's a couple of years older than him (which they can acknowledge now), and more importantly, Howard's basically a teenage dad, even as he hurtles alarmingly fast toward his mid-thirties. He never meant to have a baby, it just happened. He tries his best, but it's all a bit chaotic.

Gary though, Gary's all set up in the Cheshire countryside, with his wife and one child and last time he heard (from Howard, because who else would he hear about Gary from?), another on the way. And few things are quite as unsettling as knowing someone you always thought of as so much younger than you is all set up with a wife and kids et al., when you couldn't feel further from that point.

Jason always thought of Gary as so much younger than himself, but he isn't really, only about six months. Jason doesn't know why he thought of him like that.

(Maybe that made it all easier, made him less angry, to think Gary was young, he didn't really know what he was doing.)

He knows it's the least of Howard's, or Gary's, or the bloke in his class's worries, what he might think of their family situations. After all, they've got kids to worry about, and everything comes second to that. Jason, Jason only has to worry about himself.

(That was always how it was, wasn't it? Every man for himself.)

Jason did read once, a couple of years back, gossip about one of Robbie's girlfriends, member of some girl group or other. This must have been before he resolved to stop reading the tabloids at all. But they were saying she might be pregnant, and Jason wonders what ever came of that.

Then again, he probably doesn't want to know.

* * *

For the record, he's basically been a monk ever since he started coming to college. He's been on a couple of dates, but he's never been able to bring himself to turn any of them into a long term relationship – the girls always seem far away from him, in the end.

It's alright, Jason's got two hands and a vivid imagination, he'll manage. He's still got his end away more than most men ever will in their lives, it's probably only fair he takes a bit of a break.

Sometimes he does watch the younger students – he's not trying to be a creep or anything, but you can't avoid them forever – in their awkward, stumbling, hormonal attempts at reaching out for what they desire. Seventeen, eighteen, Jason does remember that age, kind of. His own school years, the first time around, seem a very long way away, but still, he does remember being that desperate, and that stupid.

He doesn't think much about all the girls he's slept with. There isn't much to think about. Like so much about the Take That years, they were everpresent for so long, it almost seemed permanent. And then the band ended, and that ended too.

Jason winces with guilt when he thinks about it, sometimes. Maybe it's the ex-Mormon in him. Still, those girls all came to his bed, because he was part of Take That, he was famous, he was a star. They'll probably remember shagging him the rest of their lives. And he doesn't remember them at all.

( _To be fair,_ says a snide voice at the back of his mind, _are you sure they didn't mix you up with Howard?_ )

It's not as if he thinks anyone'd be shocked by how much shagging he got up to; maybe some of their younger fans, but most people, they were in a band with girls all around them, always, offering themselves up, it'd take a strong man to resist temptation.

But he supposes he'd like to be able to convince himself he'd be better than to take advantage like that, and he knows he wasn't. He can't get round that one.

It is what it is though; Jason's seen tabloid kiss-and-tells over the years, and frankly, he has no idea which of them were true or not. He couldn't possibly believe every rumour that goes through the gossip press though. He didn't even believe every rumour that went around people who actually had something to do with them. Some of it must be true, but some of it's exaggeration, envy, and wishful thinking. There were a lot of people who wanted them, a lot of people who didn't want them, people who would make them pay for wanting them when they didn't want to want them, people who never got what they wanted but maybe...

(Jason frowns slightly when he thinks of the whole Disneyland thing – but Gaz never complained, so why should he?)

And then, there's that one rumour. That one girl – woman. You can't call someone who won a quarter of Eurovision before you were even born a girl.

Jason misses her, sometimes. It's not like they were that close for that long, but still he manages it. She taught him a lot – meditation and all that, but something more too. Jason can't put his finger on what it was.

He probably didn't shag her. She was important to him, in a way all those girls never were, and if he did shag her, he'd like to think he'd remember it.

Then again, maybe that's just him trying to justify himself.

He's thought about calling her, trying to get back in touch. But he has no idea how he would, and if he did, what would he say? It's been years. She too is so very far away – she's been in the business since before he was even born, whereas he was in the business a few years, and then ran as far from it as he possibly could. Who knows which one of them made the right decision.

(There's one person who he knows could reach out to her, if Jason reached out to him, but he won't. Not for anything.)

Being with Lulu always made things easier. There was a certainty to her. She'd been in the business longer than he'd been alive, and _she_ was still alive. She made it out okay.

If Jason did shag her, that was probably why.

* * *

He tries to be helpful 'round the place, only polite, and so when one of his teachers sends him on an errand, he's off like they fired a starting pistol. He's just on his way to ask head office for something, nothing to worry about.

One of their classes is doing media studies. Something to do with PR and all that. No-one's considered getting him in to talk from firsthand experience, and Jason is grateful. Still, as he's walking the corridors, he stumbles upon a room watching a celebrity interview up on an old telly.

And guess who it is?

Jason knows he shouldn't stop, but he can't help himself. He and Robbie Williams stopped having anything to do with each other a long time ago, and yet, Robbie Williams is a part of him, always will be.

And just maybe, he's a part of Robbie Williams too.

Jason watches him throw the window, for a second forgetting anyone might notice him, might think anything of his strange behaviour. Robbie is bathed in the blue light of a chat show set – he's grown up to be a big strapping man, but somehow, he seems much smaller than the skinny, cheeky, _annoying_ sixteen year old Jason once knew.

Robbie laughs and makes jokes with the host, but his eyes are nervous, fidgety, darting from place to place like he's looking for an exit route. _He's on something,_ Jason thinks immediately, but he's not sure it's true. Maybe that look in his eye is intoxication, maybe it's withdrawal, maybe it's sheer bloody terror. Jason hasn't spoken to Robbie in six years, why would he fucking know?

What he does know though, is that it _hurts_.

Robbie looks trapped up there, in the screen, and it makes Jason want to punch right through it, to rescue him from the virtual haze of electronic wiring, bring him back home, put him somewhere and hold him, turn him back into who he is, into who he _was_ , before Nigel and all the rest of it got hold of him.

_He hates this._

Jason looks away and a wave of rage crashes over him – toward himself. If he has all this fucking sympathy in him, where was it six years ago?

He walks off before he can be tempted to look back again. It won't do any good. Robbie too is far away, further away than just about anyone Jason can think of. Jason isn't a world-famous, world-conquering superstar. He is a student. No more, no less.

* * *

Jason is late for class. He's never late for class. But he overslept, which is stranger, because he never _sleeps_. But he didn't nod off until about three AM last night, which isn't so unusual, but for once he thinks his body decided it just needed to keep sleeping, class be damned.

He finds his heart pounding as he wakes in a haze, throws himself out the door and onto the train. _Don't be stupid,_ he tells himself, lump at the back of his throat. He's at college, they don't care so much about punctuality, and even if they did, what's the worst that could happen, detention? Embarrassing at his age, sure, but not the end of the world.

No-one is going to kick him out.

Still, he starts racing as he makes it onto the grounds, barely keeping hold of his things but he has to, he has to be there, has to prove himself, has to get it right, has to be dedicated, has to show anyone less...

Jason bursts in, panicked, and when the teacher turns to look at him, he _knows_ she's staring with nothing but sympathy and a little curiosity, but that's not what he sees. He sees disdain, fury – rejection.

_Go, you're out. If you can't turn up on time we're better off without you. There are plenty of pretty young dancers out there._

“I'm so sorry,” he blurts out before he gives himself the chance to get his bearings, before he remembers when and where he is. “I didn't mean to, I lost track of time, it won't happen again, please don't–”

“That's quite alright, Jason,” his professor tells him, faintly bemused by his babbling. She has no idea what he's on about. Who would? “We'd only just started. Please, take a seat.”

Jason swallows hard. Right, they only just started their lesson, and so it doesn't matter if he's ten minutes late. Of course it doesn't.

His usual spot down the front has been taken, and that leaves him even more on edge. He slots himself in to the middle of the room, hoping to sink into the crowd. He doesn't want to be watched.

Beside him, someone turns and looks. “You right, mate?” It's that bloke from before, the one with a daughter somewhere. In front of them, the girl who fancies Robbie turns and gazes at him with concern. Jason realises he's shaking.

He gives them both his most charming, most camera-ready smile. “Yeah. Yeah of course.” He grabs a pen and tries to get to work, because there's no reason not to be fine.

Jason's not given to great shows of emotion – Howard and Mark were more prone to that, and of course Robbie, whereas he and Gary were always stoic – but suddenly he just wants to sit there and weep. Despite the fact that everything's fine. _Because_ everything's fine.

He wants to weep because everything's fine, but he can't believe that. And he realises now, he never will.

His professor's writing up on the board again. Defence mechanisms. They're still doing defence mechanisms.

Jason tries to follow, but a sense of pointlessness creeps up on him.

There are some things that no number of A-levels will fix.

 


End file.
